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Those of you who are seasoned travellers will recognise the International Air Transport Association code for Toronto’s Pearson International Airport (followed by the inevitable ”Eh” that follows almost everything Canadian’s say).
Those of you who are fans of Rush, surely Toronto’s finest export, will recognise the much loved instrumental track from their magnificent 1981 (quadruple platinum) album “Moving Pictures”.
This particular live rendition of YYZ is from the final concert of the Vapor Trails tour (2002-2003 - I saw them twice during this tour) and takes place in Rio de Janeiro in front of 40,000 people (The previous night the played to 60,000 in Sao Paulo, their largest crowd to date in a headlining concert).
Morse Code experts amongst you will recognise “-.-- -.-- --..” being played on the cymbals then guitar and bass, this of course being the Morse Code for “YYZ”.
Rush aren’t Toronto’s only musical export (they are just the best). I can also recommend Barenaked Ladies, especially live (funnily enough they were playing here only last night).
Remember to take a pair of knickers with you (preferably clean) to throw on the stage during “Pinch Me” when Ed Robertson sings :
“You'll notice that I'm not around
I could hide out under there
I just made you say 'underwear'”
If you see them in Canada, don’t take a Kraft Dinner (otherwise known as Macaroni & Cheese) and throw this on the stage during “If I Had a $1,000,000” when Ed (or Steven Page who shares the vocals on this one) sings:
“If I had $1,000,000 we wouldn’t have to eat Kraft Dinner
(but we would!)”
This was the practice for a long time but apparently it got too painful as concert goers started to throw a bit too hard.
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Officially the US is in a recession, which is good news for gas prices (crude oil futures are now below $50 a barrel so the current prices of $1.60 to $1.90 a gallon are likely to get lower still - and it only costs $25 to fill the car up at the moment!). According to the Houston Chronicle, sales of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese rose 9.6% from last year. This dish was invented during the Great Depression of the 1930s because it was cheap and easy to make (and didn’t require hard to get meat). Talking of meat, Hormel Foods of Minnesota have added more shifts in an effort to keep up with demand for Spam. Spam is another foodstuff that originated during the Great Depression. Spam was originally known as Hormel Spiced Ham but was renamed later to help boost sales. Perhaps it was a bad choice of name because there have been many joke names since (such as “Something Posing As Meat”). For those who like Spam so much they’d like to make it at home just combine chopped pork, shoulder meat, ham meat, salt, water, suger and sodium nitrite. Mmmmm. Anyway, more importantly, Spam features in a classic Monty Python sketch (from Series 2, episode 12, December 1970), and by the miracle of YouTube here it is:
Now if you watch carefully you will see the Hungarian (John Cleese) from the even more classic (in my opinion) sketch from the same show, Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook. Here’s that one:
My nipples explode with delight...
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The fourth Thursday of November means its Thanksgiving here and the official start to the holiday season (that lasts until 1st January).
Thanksgiving has been celebrated in America since the English settlers arrived in the 17th Century. The most famous one seems to be the one in Plymouth (Massachusetts) in 1621 (however there were others before this and the earlier Spanish settlers had them in the 16th Century). Here the settlers gave thanks for the food they had managed to grow and the help they had received from the native American Indians (and in return they appear to have relieved them of their land and gave them a few casinos).
Thanksgiving is full of traditions, the main ones being:
- Thanksgiving Day parade
- Turkey for dinner
- American Football games
- A re-run of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
The Houston Thanksgiving Day Parade took place downtown just by Minute Maid Park (home of the Houston Astros MLB team).
This was an opportunity for that essential US industry, the oversized inflatable advertising product manufacturers, to show their stuff:
With that over, it was time to go home and prepare the Thanksgiving dinner.
Now if you like your turkey roasted then how about trying it deep-fried instead? That does seem to be the most popular method here.
To deep-fry a turkey you need one of these; its an outdoor stove powered by propane or similar.
Peanut oil is the lubricant of choice for this operation and Kroger conveniently stock both the stove and the peanut oil (in 5 gallon drums) together at this time of year.
Whilst roasting a turkey is a slow and relatively safe process, deep-frying one is quite quick (around an hour for a typical family-sized bird) but much more exciting. Here are just some of the safety tips you can find before deep-frying turkey:
-Ensure a fire extinguisher rated for flammable liquids is readily available.
-Use heavy gloves or oven mitts and wear a long-sleeve shirt.
-Do not consume alcohol during the process.
-There is also a possibility that an overheated turkey fryer can explode.
So there you go. Makes cooking the family dinner more entertaining than in England.
The NFL Thanksgiving Classic has three American Football games taking place on Thanksgiving Day. Two are hosted by the same teams every year (The Detroit Lions, who got beaten by the Tennessee Titans in their the biggest Thanksgiving defeat ever, 47-10, and The Dallas Cowboys, who beat the Seattle Seahawks 34-9). A third game is hosted by a team selected by the NFL each year (this year the Philadelphia Eagles played the Arizona Cardinals, The Eagles won 48-20). Since American Football games can easily last 3 or 4 hours watching these three can seriously affect what else you can do on Thanksgiving Day.
And to wrap up Thanksgiving Day, there’s the re-run of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Originally aired in 1973 this one was directed by Phil Roman who is perhaps now more famous for producing the Simpsons. And here it is from YouTube:
Thanksgiving Day is only one part of the Thanksgiving holiday. Most people have the following day off as a holiday too and this has its own traditions.
The day following Thanksgiving Day is known these days as Black Friday, so called because its supposed to be one of the busiest shopping days in the year and the day that stores go from in the red to in the black financially (although the origin of the name is apparently from Philadelphia and refers to the heavy traffic on that day).
On Black Friday stores open at 5am (or earlier) and people line up for hours before hand to get the “doorbuster” (special offer) deals. Sadly the term doorbuster was taken literally in New York state where 2,000 shoppers broke the door down to get into a Wal-Mart 5 minutes before it was due to open and killed a member of staff in the process. No bargain is worth that.
As well as shopping the other tradition (in our street at least) is to sweep the yard (or garden as it would be called in England). There appear to be two methods for doing this in our street:
-Using a rake and sweeping the leaves into a pile then collecting them up in bags for disposal.
-Using a blower to blow the leaves off your yard and either onto the street or your neighbour’s yard.
As we are without a blower we were forced to do it the hard way. Unfortunately the next day it looked no different, but the bin was at least full of leaves.
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Several events last week highlighted the differences between the two cultures of Britain and America.
It all started when we received an Amish Friendship Bread “starter”, a sample of the said bread and some instructions.
Now just to clarify the Amish are those people with the funny beards who don’t like TV and other modern things. They originated in Switzerland in the 17th Century and moved to Pennsylvania because they were persecuted in their home land. There’s about a quarter of a million Amish today in various places (mainly Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana with a few in Ontario over the Canadian border).
Amish Friendship Bread is made from a starter (a yeast-based mix) and according to our instructions requires 10 days to prepare. During the 10 days you do various things, mostly “mushing the [starter] bag” but on some days you add some flour, sugar and milk and then, of course, “mush the bag”. On the 10th day you separate the resulting batter into four and using one of these you make the bread. Then you pass on a starter to each of your friends and so the process goes.
The end result is something like this:
(I forgot to photograph the actual result before we ate it so this one’s from Wikipedia).
Amish Friendship Bread may (or may not - as usual no-one one is entirely certain of this) be something that Amish people pass around between themselves but it seems that people here (in Houston at least) do it.
Now, British people don’t do that (well, none that I know of anyway). So what do British people do? Well the good folk from the North of England (the only place where the folk are really good) cook marvelous heart warming (and probably heart clogging) traditional food like we had before we went to see Coldplay at the Toyota Center.
The mince with onion (suet) pudding that Chef Boyle made brought back (wonderful) memories of Sunderland and unfortunately, like the Amish Friendship Bread, there is no photographic evidence because it was all eaten too quickly. Its no mean feat cooking something like this in the USA yet it ought to be right up the culinary street of the people who think nothing of deep frying their turkeys (more on this later I think) or having breaded steak, eggs, hash browns and a rich gravy for breakfast.
Anyway, as I mentioned, we then went off to see Coldplay at the Toyota Center, also known as the home venue for the Houston Rockets NBA team. So here we were with 19,298 others (mostly American I expect, based on statistics) watching one of Britain’s most successful musical exports.
Coldplay are somewhat different in musical style to Opeth (the last band I saw) but nonetheless they were an excellent live act. Based on the way he moved around the stage, Chris Martin’s trousers were obviously too tight but they did entertain us all, moving around quite a bit (including performing a couple of numbers up in the nosebleed seats).
Although Coldplay were well received, two members of the audience seemed to generate even more excitement. Tony Parker (of the San Antonio Hornets NBA team - and husband of Eva Longoria of Desperate Housewives) and his teammate (who isn’t married to a famous actress otherwise I might have remembered his name) came in just before the start and caused much pleasure for many in the audience, yet they didn’t seem to enjoy the concert themselves. Anyway, we had better seats than them, so maybe that’s why they were grumpy. At least they missed the second support act, some top DJ from New York who mixed us some rad sounds to some amateur animation on a side screen for 30 minutes.
To cap off the week of cultural diversification studies, Ben came first in his class in a spelling contest and so was entered into the Strack Intermediate School Spelling Bee.
Now the only Bees we saw in Britain made honey and spelling was something limited to a few specific lessons and tests. I guess they have them elsewhere in the world nowadays but they definitely are a big thing here in America.
To highlight how serious it is taken here, ESPN (a sports channel) broadcasts the National Spelling Bee championships every year. Now if you thought watching snooker was dull imagine what a few hours of spelling would be like!
A Bee in this context is a get-together (possibly from the Old English word for prayer) and in a Spelling Bee the contestants take turns to spell words read by a judge until there are only three left and these fight it out for the top three spots.
The competitors are allowed to ask for some help in spelling the word. They can ask for the judge to repeat the word, to ask for the origin of the word or to hear a typical sentence that the word might be used in.
Spelling Bees are difficult enough but imagine if you aren’t born and raised in America (where “colour” is “color” and “centre” is “center”) and your judge comes from deepest Texas with an impressive drawl to match.
Ben spelled Samaritan incorrectly and so went out to leave the final three in the competition. He was lucky, he didn’t have to try and spell “Ottoman” (pronounced “aww-toe-may-en” by the judge).
As the multi-talented Brian Eno (who produced Coldplay’s latest album “Viva La Vida”) says “The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.”
[With special thanks to Chef Boyle for creative input and breaking the writer’s block...]
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Two years after Matt Santos won the fictional US Presidential Election in TV’s The West Wing the real life person he is supposedly based on, Barack Obama, won the real thing.
The 37 pages of other election results have also been decided (or will be today) and so thankfully we can return to normal advertising, at least for another four years.
You won’t be surprised to hear that not everyone is as happy as Mrs Obama about the result last night. An elected member of the State Board of Education in one of the districts here (ie a supposedly educated person) is predicting that Obama will “bring tyranny to America by declaring martial law after his terrorist friends attack our homeland”.
And if you think that’s an odd thing to say, then think about the number of people who didn’t want to vote for him because they thought he was a Muslim. This seems wrong to me on at least two counts: 1) He isn’t a Muslim and 2) Even if he were, as far as I know there’s nothing wrong with that in itself (some Muslims are terrorists, but then so are some Irish people and I don’t expect anyone from Boston or Chicago would mind if someone claiming to be from the Emerald Isle wanted to represent them. Timothy McVeigh was a Roman Catholic and he committed the largest terrorist attack on US soil prior to 9/11).
Anyway, I can’t wait to find out what the nutter in Kroger thinks of this news. This is the man who insisted to me that “someone” (presumably the evil Government) was controlling the direction of Hurricane Ike as otherwise how else could it have travelled so neatly straight up Interstate Highway I45? He’s bound to have a valuable insight into yesterday’s event...
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As we arrived at the Mission San Antonio de Valero, otherwise known as the Alamo, the strains of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” was just fading out on San Antonio’s new 97.7 rock station (so new it didn’t even have a decent strap line - they should follow the lead of San Francisco’s 107.7 The Bone - “Classic Rock that Rocks”).
Its funny that Ozzy Osbourne should be singing at this point, since he famously urinated on the Alamo during a tour there in 1982 (he was wearing one of Sharon’s dresses at the time, since she confiscated his clothes in an attempt to stop him going out and getting drunk and doing things like urinating on famous monuments). He was arrested and was banned from San Antonio until 1992.
1982 was a big year for Ozzy in many ways, not all good. This was the year he bit the head off a bat on stage in Des Moines (the bat incident was supposedly in response to the infamous CBS record signing incident in 1980. He and Sharon decided to generate some publicity for themselves by releasing two white doves in the CBS office when they finished the signing. When he released them he bit the head off one of them). 1982 was also the year his guitarist and songwriting partner Randy Rhodes died (along with two others) in a plane crash. He married Sharon later that year, she took over as his manager and he shaved off all his hair (all in that order).
Anyway, back to the Alamo. This was the scene of numerous battles between Texians (they were called Texians at the time when Texas was not part of the USA) and Mexicans, the most famous of which is called, unsurprisingly, the Battle of the Alamo. This ended March 6 1836 in a defeat for the Texians at the hands of the Mexicans. The Texians regained the Alamo (along with all of Texas) after they defeated the Mexicans in the Battle of San Jacinto in April that year. It was during the Battle of San Jacinto that the cry “Remember the Alamo” was made famous. Sam Houston led the Texas Army in this battle and it was this more than anything else that made him famous (definitely more than the Comcast adverts in which he appears today).
The title of today’s entry is on a plaque on the door of the Chapel building in the Alamo.
San Antonio is also famous for its Riverwalk. This is a 5km stretch of walkways which is below street level and takes you all along the riverside which goes in a loop round the city centre. The Riverwalk is full of restaurants and bars and is a great place to visit, day or night.
Amongst the bars on the Riverwalk was Mad Dogs, another annoying self-titled “British bar” that you get all too often here. This one is a chain which started in Hong Kong by people from Cambridge and Aberdeen. Not that you would have guessed it from the menu which included some sort of Guacamole, Deep South Spiced Rice, Mediterranean (that’s the sea just off the coast of...no, wait...isn’t it somewhere near Spain?) soup and vegetable kebabs. I could have forgiven them if they sold doner kebabs (even though they aren’t really British either, but like Chicken Tikka Massala it seems like they are) but what’s the point of claiming to be British and then selling stuff that plainly isn’t from Britain? I mean, its just not British. No wonder there’s no Empire these days...